A Motive for Murder

by Gallagher Gray

  Auntie Lil was like a camel, capable of going without water or a bathroom break for days, if need be. T.S. knew this and had a feeling she was up to something. In such situations, his time-honored role was to distract. “So, you worked at Salomon?” he asked Perkins easily. “Which bond desk? I know a few good men over there still.”

  As T.S. began to name acquaintances—receiving desultory replies from an unenthusiastic Perkins—Auntie Lil scurried down the hall. The first bedroom was clearly Perkins’s. It was as neat and sparse as the rest of the apartment. But the second room had to be his daughter’s. It had all the telltale signs of a young dancer’s abode. Leotards were flung over chairs and heaped on the floor, discarded toe shoes hung from nails on the wall, posters of Baryshnikov and Nureyev decorated the doors where other young girls might pin images of rock stars. Sweatpants with the legs cut off at midthigh were tossed across the bed and assorted trim and discarded ribbons from various costumes littered the pale pink carpet. Auntie Lil crept inside the room and peeked into the closet. There were few street clothes hanging inside. She opened the drawers of the pink dresser, her innate nosiness taking over. Many of the drawers held only a few articles of clothing, often hastily pushed to one side as if someone had searched through there before her. Two of the drawers were completely empty. Auntie Lil identified the probable compartments for underwear, socks, shirts, pajamas and pants. That meant the empty drawers had probably contained dance apparel such as more leotards, cutoff sweatshirts, and leggings. That was odd. She checked around the room for the ubiquitous oversized tote bag that no dancer could afford to be without. Nothing. She examined the dresser top and the adjoining bathroom for makeup. Again, nothing—an unheard of situation for a sixteen-year-old female dancer. She then examined the discarded clothing more carefully, even going so far as to handle the texture of the fabric and sniff delicately at its surface. Auntie Lil hadn’t checked up on how well the models treated her clothes during runway shows for decades and learned nothing. The clothing was stiff with long-dried old sweat and no overt smell remained. Auntie Lil was sure that the clothing had been flung there at least a few days before and then left exactly as it was. Julie Perkins did not live in this room or in this apartment anymore. Why had her father lied?

  When she returned to the living room, Perkins was still standing by the window, looking bored. T.S. was looking determinedly cheerful.

  “Ready to go,” she announced brightly as a wave of relief swept over both men’s faces. “Thank you for your time.”

  “No problem,” Perkins replied, suddenly friendly.

  His mood changes were constant. As they walked back toward the brass elevator both Auntie Lil and T.S. wondered if maybe the man wasn’t on some sort of medication. They shared their concern on the way down.

  “Something was odd,” Auntie Lil agreed. “He seemed to resent the most innocuous questions. And he was up and down like a rabbit.”

  “Yes, he was touchy about such innocent questions. Like where he worked,” T.S. decided. “I’m going to call my friend Victor over at Salomon and see what I can find out about Andrew Perkins.”

  “Victor?” Auntie Lil said as they emerged into the lobby. “Isn’t that the tiny little man with the gorgeous six-foot wife? The one who loves fishing?”

  T.S. shook his head in admiration. She was on in years, but his Aunt Lil seldom forgot a detail about the people she met.

  Auntie Lil was not ready to call it a day. First she suggested a walk through Central Park, an option that T.S.’s feet could not afford. So when he spotted a theater near Columbus Circle that was showing Mikey Morgan’s latest escapade, he suggested a movie instead. They were just in time for the last matinee before the evening rush and snagged plum seats in the middle of a center row.

  “The last movie I saw was in 1966,” Auntie Lil confided. “That one about fashion. Blow-Up, I think it was called. They got all the little details wrong. Maybe it didn’t bother some people, but it bothered me.”

  “Movies have come a long way since then,” T.S. lied. “You aren’t going to talk all the way through this one, are you?”

  “I’ll try not to,” Auntie Lil promised.

  The movie was a typical big-studio offering. Loud—very loud—and too quickly edited. Both Auntie Lil and T.S. felt they were on a runaway train.

  The plot involved a group of boys who are mistakenly sent to a summer boot camp for problem children by uncaring wealthy parents who think, instead, that their precious sons are attending a plush resort in the Poconos.

  Because no phone calls or outside contact with the world is allowed, the boys are trapped with a cast of Marine-like counselors for six weeks and transformed from little monsters into young men.

  The plot was utterly preposterous, the dialogue puerile, and Mikey Morgan hardly more appealing than he had been during The Nutcracker. But he was adorable, that was undeniable. The movie had obviously been filmed more than a year earlier, before Mikey’s latest growth spurt He had a long face and a mop of blond hair that hung over his eyes. His nose was straight and his mischievous eyes sparkled intensely. His smile was his trademark and Mikey flashed it often while onscreen, the wide grin splitting his face with impish confidence. Not a freckle, much less a pimple, marred his smooth skin.

  “He’s a much better actor than he is a dancer, don’t you think?” Auntie Lil said loudly at one point. “Given the ridiculous plot, of course.” Several people near the front glanced back at them irritably. People in Manhattan tended to go to matinees to escape the ever-present talkers that evening shows attracted.

  “Not bad,” T.S. agreed, eyes glued to the screen.

  Shushing Auntie Lil became unnecessary as the plot took a bizarre and ironic twist: the boys in the movie—led by Mikey Morgan’s character—had slipped away during a five-mile camp run and were circling back toward the waterfront. There, Mikey crawled under the foundation of a small shack and emerged with a thick rope. The boys ran back to the head counselor’s cabin and invaded the private bathroom, fashioning an elaborate slipknot noose around the edge of the metal shower’s floor rim before running the end of the rope out a window and over a nearby tree limb. Their intent was to snare the instructor in midlather, stringing him up like an animal trapped by the natives in an African safari movie.

  “Are you seeing what I’m watching?” Auntie Lil whispered.

  “Of course I am,” T.S. whispered back as indignant sssshhhs echoed at them from all sides.

  Sure enough, in the middle of the night, as the boys waited breathlessly outside, the counselor entered the shower stall and began loudly singing as he soaped up in the buff, unaware of the rope coiled around his feet.

  The boys banded together outside the window and, at an opportune time, grabbed the end of the rope and pulled. In a flurry of Hollywood editing, the rope uncoiled and tightened around the counselor’s feet, flipping him upside down and leaving him hanging from the ceiling like a well-dressed gazelle. The shower was, in reality, too small for such a move, but this was Hollywood after all and the miracle of editing made anything possible.

  The few children in the audience giggled hysterically at the sight of a bare butt, but Auntie Lil and T.S. were left speechless at the implications.

  “That was bizarre,” T.S. said after the show. Positively creepy.”

  “Yes,” Auntie Lil agreed, “more than a little macabre. And I think we know where the killer got his technique. All we need now is a motive.”

  6

  Bobby Morgan’s funeral was scheduled for 11 P.M., a time that he would probably have endorsed, as it gave him maximum newspaper and television coverage. Legions of reporters hovered on the edges of the well-dressed crowd and a dozen media vans blocked the streets nearby, littering the sidewalks with thick black cables.

  Auntie Lil, T.S., Herbert, and Lilah arrived an hour early and positioned themselves on the front steps, where they could watch the well-dressed mourners pay their respects and, possibly, cut a few deals withi
n the hallowed walls of St. Paul’s Church. Auntie Lil insisted on waiting for the appointed hour before entering because she wanted to sit in back to observe the crowd better. They settled into a pew of their own near the rear. Auntie Lil immediately fumbled in the depths of her enormous pocketbook in search of her glasses. She located them next to a paperback she had been missing for weeks and a theater program from a show she had seen in 1983. As the priest entered from the rear of the church and raised his arms for the benediction, she adjusted the glasses carefully on her nose and scrutinized the room for familiar faces.

  Most of the other board members were present, including a conspicuously sobbing Lane Rogers. Her mascara trickled down her cheeks as she heaved great sobs into a ragged tissue, her immense shoulders shaking with the effort. She was flanked by the ever-present Ruth Beretsky, who held a pack of Kleenex obediently at the ready for her friend. Hans Glick sat stiffly in the aisle seat next to Ruth, his back ramrod straight and his eyes fixed on the profusion of flower arrangements with a disapproving frown. He was no doubt mentally calculating how to arrange the blooms in a more logical fashion.

  Mikey Morgan sat in a front row, inadvertently framed by a gigantic wreath of carnations dominating the altar. He was wearing a custom-cut black suit with boxy shoulders and pipe-stem legs that made him look years older. His somber face added to the impression. Auntie Lil was struck by how much he had aged since he had starred in the movie they had seen the day before. His mother sat next to him. She was a petite woman with close-cropped brown hair and a triangular face. She wore a simple navy suit, a string of pearls, and matching earrings. Her arm was draped protectively over the back of the pew behind her older son. She was remarkably thin, given that she was the mother of four children. The rest of her brood sat in descending order to her right. Auntie Lil knew that Bobby Morgan had moved to Los Angeles two years before, following his divorce, and taken only Mikey with him. Though the younger children had presumably not seen him much since, their rigid posture and stunned expressions belied their disbelief that their father—however distant—had died. The row of tiny faces, crumpled in bewilderment, triggered the first pangs of true regret in more than one mourner’s heart.

  Many of the pews were jammed with fashionably thin colleagues whose almost bizarrely deep tans, frosted or feathered hair, and loosely constructed designer clothing marked them as members of the Los Angeles entertainment community. There was more makeup per square inch of skin than at a Mary Kay cosmetics convention. Interspersed among these glowing humans sat the paler and more diverse New Yorkers, their faces grim. Unlike the uniformly fit West Coast contingent, the New Yorkers ranged in size from the emaciated to the downright obese. Among the emaciated were many members of the corps de ballet, who had turned out to pay their respects to the man whose death they had witnessed. They dotted the room with their own brand of brightly colored, free-flowing fashion.

  Artistic Director Raoul Martinez sat in a third-row pew, his mane of glossy black hair gleaming with multicolored reflections from a nearby stained-glass window. His wife, Lisette, sat regally beside him, her long neck swaying slightly to the organ music floating in on waves of flower-scented air. She was an exotic figure, dressed in austere black that highlighted the extreme angles of her sculptured cheekbones. Her hair was pulled back in so severe a knot that Auntie Lil wondered if her grimace was due to her hairstyle. Tears glistened prettily on her eyelashes as the priest began the opening prayer.

  Many of the couples in the crowd held hands or draped arms around each other for support. Raoul and Lisette Martinez were an exception. They sat side by side without acknowledging each other’s presence. They were joined in their row by a subdued Paulette Puccinni, wearing a black caftan, and Jerry Vanderbilt, whose face was respectfully somber. Although the crowd represented numerous opportunities for comment and gossip, neither Paulette nor Jerry looked up to the task. In fact, they both seemed queasy at their proximity to death.

  Andrew Perkins sat in the opposite pew, next to a willowy teenager whose sullen frown proved she was his daughter much more than the fact that she was a plainer version of the self-possessed dancer of a few nights before. Julie Perkins looked younger without makeup, though still much older than her years. Her blond hair was combed to midback and anchored with a wide black velvet ribbon. The simple style suited her delicate, deerlike features. She had the preternatural bearing of a well-trained dancer, which gave her a grace that was eerie in so young a child. Her hands did not simply turn the pages of the prayer book; they posed and fluttered in a delicate progression. As the service began she inched farther and farther away from her father until she had opened the space of another body between them. Several other young dancers, possibly from her class, sat quietly on her other side. As the atmosphere inside the church grew increasingly stuffy and the music louder, they began to weep as only teenagers can weep: with wide eyes, flowing tears, and an enthusiastically morbid realization that death could happen to them as well at any time. Julie Perkins wept with the same ritualized style she had used to ignore her father: her shoulders moved in delicate rhythm to the organ, her hands spread out like paper fans over her face, her head held at a becoming angle.

  “Who are those people?” T.S. whispered to Auntie Lil when a pew of gray-haired, plainly dressed people caught his eye. Two men and three women, all in their late sixties or early seventies, sat in the second row. Their faces were stamped honestly with their age; no artifice or surgery had been used to mask the wear and tear of passing years. The men had stiff crew cuts of a style long gone from favor. The women had white hair swept and lacquered into obedient mounds. Though clad appropriately in dark suits and dresses, their dated attire looked curiously new, as if their clothes had hung unused for decades between funerals. When the coffin was brought down the center aisle, all three women produced handkerchiefs and began to cry in unison, like an elderly Greek chorus.

  “That’s his family,” a woman behind them whispered in response to T.S.’s question. When she leaned forward, a cloud of perfume preceded her, choking his nostrils. Thank God Lilah didn’t fumigate herself like that, he thought. Thank God she smelled of nothing more than soap and fresh air.

  “They’re his uncles and aunts,” the woman continued, as if savoring her grasp of inside information. “They’re straight out of On the Waterfront. Can you believe it? I could cast them as extras tomorrow.”

  T.S. glanced behind him and caught a glimpse of a woman so thin that her arms protruded from her black linen dress like a child’s mistakenly grafted onto an adult body. Her face was deep bronze, the skin stretched tight and the hair relentlessly feathered in too casual spikes. He turned quickly back around and calmed himself with a peek at Lilah. Lilah seemed so more vibrant and human, with her delicate wrinkles and silver hair. Were these the people Bobby Morgan wheeled and dealed with? They were like well-dressed Halloween ghouls.

  The service itself was curiously devoid of emotion.

  People wept, but with the exception of the teenagers, they shed their tears sparingly and surreptitiously repaired the damage to their makeup when they were done. They were playing out a script, reacting on cue, producing appropriate rather than true feelings. Few among the crowd seemed genuinely sorry that Bobby Morgan was dead.

  “He shows no emotion whatsoever,” Auntie Lil whispered as the service drew to a close. She nodded toward Mikey Morgan. He sat stone-faced next to his mother, staring at his father’s coffin. Not a muscle twitched. He could have been in a trance.

  The doors of the church were heavy and soundproofed. As two men in suits opened the heavy slabs for the pallbearers who would lift the coffin into the waiting hearse, a wall of sound invaded the church like the roar of a terrifying beast: people shouting, horns honking, engines racing. It was more than typical New York City chaos.

  As one of the first people to follow the casket outside, Auntie Lil soon found out what the commotion was all about: the Reverend Ben Hampton was back. He had chosen to stag
e a demonstration at Bobby Morgan’s funeral. Though a tasteless occasion for protest, she had to admire his sense of drama. Ben Hampton was dressed like a preacher at an old-time Southern revival and held a black Bible aloft from his perch on a makeshift platform set up on the church steps. Dozens of reporters and television announcers elbowed each other for room before him. They competed with Hampton’s regular protestors, who were dressed in black and held a coffin labeled RACIAL EQUALITY on their shoulders.

  The Reverend’s words were inaudible to few beyond the immediate crowd, but whatever he was saying must have made for good copy. Not a single reporter reacted to the real coffin being carried down the church’s front steps. In a perfect example of the fickle interests of the American public, Bobby Morgan had been replaced by a fresher story before his own had even drawn to an end.

  Suddenly a squad of patrol cars swarmed to a halt behind the television vans. A sleek black limousine eased in behind them like a shark gliding silently toward its prey. A silver-haired man dressed in Armani strode from the car holding handcuffs aloft. He was followed by a pack of faithful flacks in slightly less expensive suits.

  “The police commissioner,” Lilah told them. “What’s he doing here?”

  As cameras clicked and whirred, the commissioner pushed his way through the crowd behind a wedge of uniformed officers. Climbing up the church steps until he reached the Reverend Ben Hampton, he held the handcuffs up for the cameras and proclaimed, “Benjamin Hampton, you’re under arrest for the premeditated murder of Robert K. Morgan, with malice aforethought. You have the right to remain silent...”

  Many cautious NYC precincts had recorded prior Miranda warnings on film. But it was doubtful that any Miranda warning had ever been immortalized by so many cameras before. By that evening, the Reverend Ben Hampton’s arrest and the meticulous upholding of his constitutional rights had been beamed into over 78% percent of all American households, courtesy of modern technology.